UCLA In the News January 18, 2018

“It doesn’t strike me that what was found was malfeasance,” said UCLA education professor John Rogers. “In a system where there’s high stakes attached to any information, there’s always going to be pressure to shape that information…. Every local actor is going to try to present their graduation rate in as favorable a way as possible.” Graduation rates are a crucial indicator not just of school progress but of equity, said Tyrone Howard, a UCLA education professor and director of the school’s Black Male Institute. “If the numbers aren’t as reliable as they say,” he asked, “are there fewer … African American and Latino students graduating than what they’re reporting?”

Consider the marmot. After spending 13 years tracking their interactions and life spans in Colorado, Daniel T. Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues found in a study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that yellow-bellied marmots with more active social lives tended to die younger than those that avoided interactions. “The difference in life span between the most social and the least social marmot was about two years,” said Dr. Blumstein. That’s significant considering that the average life span of a yellow-bellied marmot is about 15 years. (Also: The Verge and Phys.org)

“It’s just not realistic, the continued dangling of the carrot to the public that you too can become a YouTube sensation and monetize your way to riches,” says Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor of information studies at UCLA and an expert in internet culture. “The bar keeps getting moved higher and higher. It’s become more and more difficult for anyone to do that.”

“It seems to me that this is designed to erase liability in that case and also potential liability in any future cases for them, and substitute taxpayer-funded bond measures to do the remediation that these companies would otherwise be responsible for,” said Sean Hecht, a UCLA School of Law professor who has followed the litigation.

“Influenza comes around every year, and it circulates the globe. The best way that we have to prevent illness from influenza from year to year during the flu season is by preparing vaccinations that are likely to be protective against the flu that arrives in the northern hemisphere in the early winter. Unfortunately this year, the guessing on the part of the experts, with regards to which strain of the flu would be affecting the population, was not as accurate as in other years, and so, the vaccine that we’ve been giving people is not as effective as we had hoped,” said UCLA’s Brian Prestwich.

“I feel comfortable saying that any survey of LGBT identity likely underestimates the full population because it only accounts for one part of sexual and gender minority status, ‘identity,’” said Bianca Wilson of the Williams Institute, a national think tank at the UCLA School of Law that advances sexual orientation and gender identity law.

“The plateauing fatality rates indicate that what has been done to decrease deaths from alcohol-impaired driving has been working but is no longer sufficient to reverse this growing public health problem,” report committee chair Steven Teutsch said in a news release from the National Academies. “Our report offers a comprehensive blueprint to reinvigorate commitment and calls for systematic implementation of policies, programs, and systems changes to renew progress and save lives,” he added. Teutsch is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Public Health Institute. (Also: Medical Xpress)

“The Partnership gets credit for taking on some of the most challenging schools in Los Angeles … as opposed to picking off easy wins, so to speak,” said [UCLA’s John] Rogers. “When people around the country talk about models of restorative justice and peaceful environments, I point them to some of the Partnership schools.”

Lake Palcacocha, which sits above Huaraz, the region’s capital, has grown 34 times larger than it was in 1970 as glacial meltwater pours down from the mountains, said Courtney Cecale, a University of California, Los Angeles, PhD student in anthropology, who is studying climate impacts in the Cordillera Blanca. “The wrong earthquake or avalanche could send an enormous tidal wave into the valley below, directly threatening 110,000 lives,” she said.